It’s been ten days and I still haven’t seen an iPhone. I’ve been inside a few AT&T stores, where circumstances and extremely dim clerks have conspired to prevent my laying hands on the thing. Getting to an Apple Store, while possible, takes a long time, and I just haven’t been able to spare time for the two round-trip bus rides that would be required.
Early on, I read the iPhone reviews. It was interesting to see if people who had been persistent enough to stand in line would be anything other than fanboys or fangirls. But I quickly began wanting a real user’s perspective–the point of view of a person who isn’t conversant in phone terminology like EDGE, GSM and so forth, and someone who would never ever, under any circumstances, use the word “converged”. I haven’t yet found much of that (I’m probably reading the wrong blogs) and I really do wonder if anyone, anywhere, has even thought about the digital divide the iPhone symbolizes. I mean good grief: a world in which people line up to spend $500 on a phone as the cameras roll, while people are dying in wars, and the president it flouting the law of the land is really hard for me to square up. To be sure, that’s a totally false equivalency in terms of political argument. All I can tell you is that something feels wrong about it. Our priorities as smart, educated people are screwed up when we obsess about technology we don’t need. And feeling wrong about tech excess in the face of looming political injustice is just as valid a construct as feeling that you desperately want a $500 phone.
Still, I want to see one of the damn things.
